IRISPen Executive 6 review

Scan all manner of textual content quickly and easily into your Mac with the IRISPen Executive 6

by
David Howell| 17 Jan 11

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Rating

Price

RRP: £168.35

Pros

Text-to-speech capability

fast and easy set-up

no external power supply or battery needed

wide-range of text

numeric and barcodes recognised

Cons

Small scanning window

accuracy can vary

problems reading handwriting

IRISPen Executive 6 review

Handheld scanners have been in existence for some time. However, their text reading and capabilities have often left a lot to be desired. Thankfully, OCR technology has now progressed to enable these devices to be useful and accurate.

This executive model is fine for scanning small amounts of printed or handwritten text and barcodes. The pen is very light with a generous length of USB cable that also powers the scanner.

IRISPen Executive 6

However, expect to spend some time setting the device up. It took us a while to tweak the pen’s settings to ensure consistent scanning, and you’ll need a steady hand if you intend to scan large amounts of text accurately.

The resulting image can then be saved to your Mac’s clipboard and pasted into a Word document for further editing.

OUR VERDICT

Ideally suited to scan barcodes and small amounts of high-quality text or numerical information, the IRISPen performs well at these tasks. We were surprised at its accuracy, but felt that the package – especially its software – needs a major overhaul.